The other day I got a call from a user who had somehow managed to make all his desktop shortcuts open in Word. I suspected he had used the “open With” option in the context menu; thus, telling Windows to “Always use this program to open these files”. The problem was clear. Even though each shortcut had the correct settings, Windows would still open them in Word. The problem is, you can’t just tell Windows to open the shortcut files in an other program than Word. You have to somehow Reset the shortcut behavior to factory settings.

So how did we fix it ?

Last week I talked about the different shut-down options in Windows. One of our readers (Alexandra) wanted to know how to tell Windows to shut-down or hibernate at a certain time. The easiest way to do this is to set windows to automatically shut-down or hibernate after a specific period of idleness using the Power Option Settings. There might be several reasons why you would opt out the Power Option solution, but one reason might be that you do not want the computer to shut-down at all during the day. If that be the case, you can schedule Windows to shut-down at a specific time, say at 3 am after you have fallen asleep over the keyboard.

This is how you go about to do just that (not fall asleep, but schedule the computer to …)

At Windows Guides, we do our very best to bring you the best tips, advice, and freebies. In this guide, we share the first part of 100 of the best free icon packs available online. The posts are broken into two because of the size of the images needed to preview each pack. For those on dial-up, 7.14MB of images may be a little much—hopefully by splitting this post into two parts, you’ll be able to get the most out of these great downloads.

At Windows Guides, we do our very best to bring you the best tips, advice, and freebies. In this guide, we share the second part of 100 of the best free icon packs available online. The posts are broken into two because of the size of the images needed to preview each pack. For those on dial-up, 7.14MB of images may be a little much—hopefully by splitting this post into two parts, you’ll be able to get the most out of these great downloads.

Recently, I asked iTunes to organize my music directory (getting music from different sources other than just the iTunes store left it a little messy and I decided I’d let iTunes do its thing) and it did a great job; however, it left a bunch of empty directories. Although these empty directories didn’t pose any performance impact, they just looked… messy and I decided I’d delete them. I started doing this one by one and soon realized I had over 50 empty directories and sub directories. Being lazy, I decided to run a command to remove these directories. I’ve done this a lot in Linux so I figured it was easy; well, not quite, but it’s also not that hard. In this guide, I’ll show you what I did and hope you can find this useful in some way.

I have written a guide for next week that explains running tasks as an administrator in Windows XP. Just like modern cars (some, not all) don’t fully turn off the traction control even when you press the switch, modern versions (including XP) don’t give you full administrative permissions (even with an Administrator account.) Thus, you’ll need to activate the “hidden” administrator account in Windows to have full control over your files and settings.

Please note: Only activate and use this account if you have a need to do so (i.e. tinkering with system files on a non-critical PC.)